p2pnet news view | RIAA News:- RIAA “investigator” MediaSentry has been caught with its undergarments around its ankles. Again.

Massachusetts State Police at the beginning of the year MediaSentry to cease and desist, according to court papers filed by a Boston University student who was asking the court to to quash an RIAA subpoena .

So did it C&D?

Nope.

Now, “We have just learned from court papers filed in Capitol v. Doe, one of the six (6) John Doe cases targeting North Carolina State University students in Raleigh, North Carolina, that a Grievance Committee hearing, to determine the existence of probable cause, has been scheduled by North Carolina’s Private Protective Services Board, in connection with the complaints that have been filed charging MediaSentry with the crime of unlicensed investigation,” says Recording Industry vs The People.

Says lawyer Stephen E. Robertson in a court document >>>

The nature of the complaint is that the Big 4 companies who dominate the recording industry, the enforcement/lobbying of the music industry- the RIAA - and MediaSentry have devised an investigation is keen that we believe is both illegal and seriously flawed.

The scheme is based on secret private investigations by unlicensed, unregistered and uncertified private investigators.

These private investigators claim to have entered the hard drives of hundreds, if not thousands, of private North Carolina citizens to look for music recordings stored there. This personal invasion is being investigated in many other states. If music was “discovered” through this process, the private investigators would then sell the identity of the computers’ Internet protocol address to the RIAA and the Big 4 record companies.

We believe that in all these cases the MediaSentry acquisitions of the data were done by surreptitious means; and the sale of the information to the Big 4, investigations constituting a series of crimes in North Carolina.

According to the Private Protective Services Act, the private detectives and/or private investigators from MediaSentry engage in the profession the purpose of “[s]ecuring evidence to be used before [a] court …”

But MediaSentry’s investigators aren’t licensed in North Carolina, continues Robertson.

At the beginning of the year p2pnet posted >>>

The Massachusetts State police have banned the company, it’s been accused of operating without a licence in Oregon, Florida, Texas and New York, and similar charges have been levelled at it in Michigan, we said in Is RIAA’s MediaSentry illegal in YOUR state?

Regretfully, we didn’t get around to running further follow-ups. But the score at the time looked like this >>>

Jon Newton - p2pnet

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This entry was posted on Saturday, July 12th, 2008 at 10:08 am and is filed under RIAA News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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